Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Sore Loser

The Washington Post today has a great article on Alabama's own Jeff Sessions. (H/T Locust Fork News). You need to read the whole thing, but here are some quotes.

Sessions on his Southern heritage:

Alabama's Jeff Sessions sure knows how to nurse a grudge. Talking about his family earlier this year, the Republican senator recalled that "Lincoln killed one of them at Antietam."

Sessions on the current immigration bill:

"This bill is one of the worst pieces of legislation to come before the Senate," he proclaimed at a news conference yesterday, his second on the topic in as many weeks. He paused, unsatisfied with that superlative. "It's the worst piece of legislation to come before the Senate since I've been here."

A stream of epithets about the legislation flowed from his mouth and those of the two conservative scholars he brought with him. "Colossal error . . . absolute scandal . . . budget buster . . . fiscal disaster . . . catastrophe."

Linda Scott of PBS's "NewsHour" pointed out that the Alabama Farmers Federation takes the opposite view.

The senator fired back: "They want cheap labor and they're not considering the interest of the United States of America."

Sessions on the problems of legal immigration:

Forecasting a mass immigration of 73 million to 92 million over the next 20 years [for those keeping score at home, that would be pretty much the entire population of Mexico], Sessions described the process in extraordinary detail: "The nuclear family that we bring in after five years, they become citizens, they bring in their parents. . . . The parents can bring in their parents if they're still alive. They really can. Maybe they're 90. They can bring in others -- their brothers and sisters. The uncles, all the uncles can come in with this through the parents here. And the wife can bring in brothers and sisters and then the wife brings in her brother, who brings in his wife and two children and she brings in her parents. And it just goes on."

And don't forget his sterling history as a humanitarian:

Sessions was one of just nine senators to oppose a ban on torture. He has raised objections about renewing the Voting Rights Act. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, according to Time magazine, Sessions, pushing for repeal of the estate tax, called a former law professor to see if he knew of any business owner who died in the storm.

And if his current fight in the Senate appears unwinnable, Sessions also knows how to turn defeat into victory. He sits on the same Judiciary Committee that in 1986 rejected him for a federal judgeship; opponents at the time cited his labeling of groups such as the NAACP as "un-American" and his prosecution of civil rights activists for voting fraud.